High leukemia treatment costs may be harming patients, say experts

The increasing cost of treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in the USA has reached unsustainably high levels and may be leaving many patients under- or untreated because they cannot afford care, according to a Blood Forum article supported by nearly 120 CML experts from more than 15 countries on five continents and published on-line in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Haematology (ASH), reported by EurekAlert.

CML was selected as the focus of the piece because it is now considered a highly curable disease, thanks to the emergence of powerful, targeted CML therapies known as tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) that allow patients to manage their disease with few symptoms by taking a well-tolerated pill. Since the introduction of TKI therapy more than a decade ago, the annual mortality of patients with this disease has declined from 10% to 20% in the early 2000s to just 2% today and the estimated 10-year survival of CML patients has increased from 20% to more than 80%.

"Patients with CML have a much better outlook today than ever before, thanks to advances that have greatly improved survival rates. But these patients now face dire financial struggles as they try to maintain their treatment regimen with the drastically inflating cost of care. And this issue likely extends to patients with other types of cancer who require ongoing treatment to maintain therapeutic benefit," said corresponding author Hagop Kantarjian, chairman of the leukemia department at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.